African City Textualities is self-consciously intended as a riposte to the pessimistic views of the African city under the black cloud of the ‘planet of the slums’ that seems to be increasingly shrouding the continent. Inspired particularly by the geographer Jennifer Robinson's recent Ordinary Cities, the essays collected here mostly emphasise the experiential, the creative and the hopeful – rather than the despairing – voices from within African cities which are increasingly going to be the cauldron of national development. Indeed Robinson, who stresses the city as source of innovation, offers a couple of pages of commentary at the end of the volume. Ivan Vladislavic, the South African novelist, is the ultimate African flâneur who can observe a Johannesburg so fractioned, so transformed, that multiple meanings imbue the same voices, gestures, signs and sights. But his plea for tolerance and bridging is hardly the whole story.

Terence Ranger takes us through systematic ways in which long-time black residents of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, mark their past. This convincing essay could be a model for those interested in how to capture memory systematically in the urban African context. Subjects remember racism and deprivation, but also the comforts of a colonial paternalism, and moments of hope and belief in political progress as well as defeat. Its texture allows for a deeper sense of the currents of urban life than the big paradigms.

Of all the essays, however, only Donal Cruise O'Brien in considering Dakar actually takes on Mike Davis and company at the level of political economy. The editor, Ranka Primorac, is herself a literary critic and most contributions consider literary representations of the city ranging from the sophisticated post-modern fiction of Vladislavic to the advice, which apparently changes little, for would-be Nigerian wives by pamphleteers over the past half-century. Other chapters explore the career of Phil Lutaaya, an iconic Ugandan pop singer who died of AIDS after revealing his status, the insertion of Lusaka into the private-eye fiction of a Zambian novelist, and the way in which an ‘urban legend’ about an English tourist's violent death in Kenya – where fear has counted large as a response to an authoritarian government which covered up its most heinous deeds – circulates. Not all of this fits the formula entirely. Rita Nnodim accurately shows that recent fiction set in Lagos is just as dystopian as any stereotyped Western description could be. Lutaaya's sad end and the ruthlessness of the Kenyan state pose the betrayal of the modernist dream more than its exploration. However, Robinson is quite right that with regard both to twentieth-century history and to the present, the city is indissoluble from a discourse of ‘modernity’ in African eyes, even if this is a modernity that can have quite different markers in different milieux and can lead to despair when the promise is cruelly refuted. This is certainly what I have noted in recent research set in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.

Gender issues loom large in some essays here. Modernity takes the shape of a threat to older ideals, especially those held by men, as well as being potentially emancipatory for women. Meg Samuelson explores this theme in an essay on 1940s Sophiatown literature in some depth, as does Newell on Nigerian marriage self-help narratives. What is largely missing in these essays is an appreciation of class. Modernity is really the prism, the perspective above all of educated Africans, who see it as defining and empowering. A literary emphasis confirms this in practice but obscures it methodologically. Ranger reminds us (as has James Ferguson elsewhere for the Copperbelt) that workers have sometimes shared the dreams of the elite, as do the keen aspirant readers of the self-help books that Stephanie Newell considers. But this is an historic path that is beginning to bifurcate. It is left to an inserted Zambian newspaper columnist, Laura Miti-Banda, to remind us that African cities are beginning to be remade by an African elite, a process intended to exclude most of the population and most of the territory of African nations. Cairo Road, once the apex of consumer dreams, is now in decay as more difficult-to-reach shopping centres mushroom, and the older vision of modernity it represented has begun to look old hat.